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Reddit raises $410M in new funding

nytimes.com

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Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#261

Post by jimmydorry »

evandwight wrote: post #247
hutzlibu wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And fix the moderator system so "first to register controls the sub" is no longer the case" Suggestions? This is a complex proplem.

Do you think having all the members of the subreddit (or the entire site) vote on who the mod should be? I think there are many ways to make this efficient by statistical sampling, proxy votes, and detecting when statistical errors occur. To restrict people to one account you'd need to verify phone numbers. I'm currently trying to build this but I'm not a programmer so it's slow going. I'm interested in your thoughts…

There is nothing to stop people or groups of people from making thousands of accounts and joining the sub, and then eventually taking control. Even if these user accounts have to be X years old, or subbed for Y months, none of that matters in the long term.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#262

Post by techrat »

Allower wrote: post #15
dcolkitt wrote: post #9

On a visitor perspective, this seems undervalued. This is a 50% or more discount to the market-cap/unique visitor ratio of Twitter, Snap, and Facebook.[1] And all the stats I've seen indicate much higher user engagement and time on site for Reddit compared to the other social platforms. The biggest issue is of course that their monetization is horrible. Like 95% lower per user than the other socials.[2] So the real q…

And then you would see a mass exodus of users..

I'd argue that the majority of the users that made the site worth using have already left.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#263

Post by Blikkentrekker »

buu700 wrote: post #238
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, by all means block phrases like "kill yourself" Even that will often lead to the scunthorpe problem . I remember well once scouring through a post that was rejected on a forum to finally realize it was because it contained the phrase “tardive dyskinesia” which contained “tard” which alone was enough to deny the post, apparently.

FWIW, I think it's silly that reddit has banned the term "retard" site-wide, although I also acknowledge that the term may be becoming broader and more offensive than I personally understand it to be. In the case of "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch, though, it's such an extreme case with potentially disastrous results that I wouldn't find it particularly problematic. The occasional false positive is arguably a smal…

> FWIW, I think it's silly that reddit has banned the term "retard" site-wide, although I also acknowledge that the term may be becoming broader and more offensive than I personally understand it to be.

Do you have any source of this? As far as I know Reddit bans no words site-wide, and I see the term used now and then.

On the very same website a post could not come through because I described someone as having “retarded pubertal development”, in any case.

> In the case of "kill yourself" in /r/SuicideWatch, though, it's such an extreme case with potentially disastrous results that I wouldn't find it particularly problematic. The occasional false positive is arguably a small price to pay.

It's also completely useless because people that want to get through the censor will et through it by other means that will still make their message easily understood.

Word censors are window politics and people that want to get around them will get around them and I assume it's already against the rules on that subreddit to encourage suicide so they would be quite willing to also break a rule to evade word censors.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#264

Post by emodendroket »

potatoman22 wrote: post #134
emodendroket wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So join a different community on Reddit whose rules you like better, or make one. Why does everyone have to allow everything?

I think that once a sub attracts a large amount of readers, it's unethical to block certain conversations. For large subs like /r/politics, a select few people get to control what's fed into the eyeballs of millions of people. And we don't even know what content wasn't allowed to be posted, how can we trust they're unbiased?

It's shown time and time again that the alternative, with a radical free-speech approach to content moderation, is that the community attracts users who post trash content (e.g., white nationalism, screwball conspiracy, glorification of violence, misogyny), who then gradually drive away everyone else. That's why they never attract much of a following and end up withering and dying.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#265

Post by emodendroket »

pageandrew wrote: post #119
emodendroket wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So join a different community on Reddit whose rules you like better, or make one. Why does everyone have to allow everything?

Reddit pushes certain communities to the front page and suggests them to users, and quarantines/bans other communities.

I'm not going to shed any tears over them shutting down communities devoted to hate speech because the site has become noticeably more pleasant to read and participate in as those users went elsewhere.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#266

Post by evandwight »

jimmydorry wrote: post #261
evandwight wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think having all the members of the subreddit (or the entire site) vote on who the mod should be? I think there are many ways to make this efficient by statistical sampling, proxy votes, and detecting when statistical errors occur. To restrict people to one account you'd need to verify phone numbers. I'm currently trying to build this but I'm not a programmer so it's slow going. I'm interested in your thoughts…

There is nothing to stop people or groups of people from making thousands of accounts and joining the sub, and then eventually taking control. Even if these user accounts have to be X years old, or subbed for Y months, none of that matters in the long term.

Yes. With this system it would be important to verify identities on sign up. I think verifying phone number would largely resolve the issue (SMS short codes don't work on VOIP phones). There many other levels to reduce fake accounts that can be added if problems begin to occur.

The main issue is the more difficult sign up is, the less people sign up. It's a balancing act.

With any voting system you have to detect the validity of the votes, even upvotes.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#267

Post by markdown »

Smashure wrote: post #245
heywintermute wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Or is there something intrinsic to Reddit traffic that makes it difficult to monetize? Reddit is also home to an enormous amount of porn and nsfw content in general which probably hurts this. They only just started preventing sexually explicit subreddits/content from appearing on r/all six months ago[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_...

That was when I left Reddit. I felt like censoring from r/all is not what I want from r/all. To me that means every subreddit except quarantined subreddits. Once they started down that road I took off and haven’t been back.

This is like refusing to visit a town because they don't allow the local strip club to advertise on the billboards there.

I mean, the town hasn't banned the strip club, and you can still visit it any time you want.

Why do you care what's on r/all?

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#268

Post by emodendroket »

marcinzm wrote: post #154
potatoman22 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that once a sub attracts a large amount of readers, it's unethical to block certain conversations. For large subs like /r/politics, a select few people get to control what's fed into the eyeballs of millions of people. And we don't even know what content wasn't allowed to be posted, how can we trust they're unbiased?

>I think that once a sub attracts a large amount of readers, it's unethical to block certain conversations. Why? You're free to make your own subreddit with a different bias or no bias. No one really assumes it's unbiased and they go there because of the bias that they agree with. People like communities of like minded people. By that logic any large scale media (tv, newspapers, magazines, etc.) should not be allowed…

This is quite true too. If you don't feel like politics is conservative enough for your tastes, worldnews is right there for you. And there are countless smaller communities catering to nearly any perspective imaginable.

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#269

Post by themacguffinman »

Dah00n wrote: post #199
yissp wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just checked /r/linux, which I browse on occasion, and the three sponsored posts I saw on the front page were for Intel vPro, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Google Chromebooks. Those all seem at least reasonably relevant.

Really? I'd say they are closer to unreasonably irrelevant. Maybe I could stretch myself to see a Chomebook being interesting and relevant. To me seeing the other two would make me look negatively on the brands/products. If those who sees an add get nothing out of it except wasted time I'd say they are spam. Those sound like 100% spam to me in /r/linux.

Not sure why vPro would be irrelevant, vPro can work with Linux AFAICT and there's some overlap between /r/linux and /r/sysadmin [1].

[1] https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/linux

Re: Reddit raises $410M in new funding

#270

Post by techrat »

themanmaran wrote: post #7

I'm honestly surprised to learn that Reddit is still VC dependant. Seems strange to me that a 16 year old company still isn't self sustaining.

> Seems strange to me that a 16 year old company still isn't self sustaining.

Based on Reddit's own information, it would appear that they are.

Picking just one frontpage sub, /r/News, you can check the guilded page and see:

> gildings in this subreddit have paid for 142.83 years of server time

pics? 291.80 years.

funny? 364.09 years.

aww? 624.43 years.

askreddit? 724.03 years.

politics? 314.93 years.

That's 6 subs.

According to Reddit's own guildings report, 6 subs on Reddit have paid for a combined 2461.21 years worth of server time.

They're self sustaining. Reddit has bitten the 'growth at all costs' bug.

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